New Website Guide For Conversion Rate Optimization

When setting up a new site, your primary goal is to provide information and in return get your readers to act on it. You obviously don’t want to do all the hard work that goes into creating and maintaining a site only for your visitors to leave without taking the desired action you had purposed the site for.

This is where conversion rate optimization comes in.

What is Conversion Rate Optimization?

Abbreviated as CRO, conversion rate optimization can simply be defined as the percentage of a site’s traffic that completes the desired action. For most websites, the conversion goals range from signing up for a newsletter, making a purchase or placing an order, downloading software or an app, clicking through to an offer page, or reserving a ticket among others.

The purpose of tracking CRO results is to enable you improve any website metric that could be hindering your visitors from taking these actions which ultimately impacts your bottom line. Put otherwise, CRO helps you make the most of your existing traffic to boost the productivity of your online business.

Here, we show you five simple strategies you can use to quickly improve your new site’s CRO.

Strive to Attract the Most Qualified Traffic Possible

The first and probably the most important rule of increasing conversions for your new site is to sieve your traffic sources to ensure only people who are passionately interested in your offerings visit the site. It makes little sense really directing poor traffic to your business only for visitors to bounce back and as a result, give your online business a bad rap (for example, in the eyes of Google).

The idea is to ensure that by the time a user reaches your site, he or she already knows what to expect and is probably interested in what you offer inside.

There are several ways you can use to attract qualified traffic including targeting appropriate keywords for your site’s content, using highly targeted adverts and narrowing down your audience to the most suitable for your offers, and placing paid ads on sites where your ideal visitors hang around.

Take Care of Your Site’s Overall Performance

It doesn’t matter how convincing your messaging is or how much value your product offers to users – if your website is not properly optimized for performance, you’ll lose most of your visitors and revenue. A critical aspect that you cannot afford to overlook is the site loading speed. According to multiple studies, if your pages take more than three seconds to load, you’re probably losing approximately half of your traffic.

So, how do you avoid this?

For starters, it’s important that you get a fast and reliable hosting provider– feel free to check MangoMatter for more info and recommendations for good hosts. Besides, you will need to optimize your images and other multimedia elements in your site to reduce the amount of bandwidth consumed. Finally, minimize the number of plugins installed on your site – only using them when no other alternative exists.

Under-Promise and Over-Deliver

Whether you’re getting your visitors organically from search results or driving traffic using paid ads, it’s important that your offerings at least matches the expectations of users coming to your site. Failure to meet these expectations will mean that the majority of your visitors will bounce out without even checking what’s on offer.

For best results, use identical phrases and messages both at the source of your traffic and the web page where your visitors land. Also, where your audience is not completely homogenous, you can choose to segment it and use different messaging depending on what works best for each of these groups.

Make Your Site Easy to Navigate

You might have the most beautiful website (and one that loads fast) but if your users can’t locate what they came to look for there, chances are high that they’ll leave as quickly as they came in. To improve navigation and the overall user experience, consider adding features like a search box and clear call-to-action buttons. More importantly, don’t forget to optimize your site for mobile use to ensure you’re not losing potential customers using mobile to access your online business.

Collect and Use Data to Improve Your Business

With technology advancing daily and tens of tools being released every week, it pays to automate how you collect and analyze data on your website. For CRO, a good place to start is traffic insights which you can gather using a free tool like Google Analytics. You can also use heat map tools like HotJar or CrazyEgg to record and track user activity on your site.

Use the data collected here to identify possible areas of improvement which is the first step when looking to boost conversions and improve user experience.

Have you started CRO work for your new site? Which observations have you made so far and what strategies are you looking to implement to boost your conversions? We’d love to hear your feedback.